Donald Trump’s still allowed to run for president despite his actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election and role in instigating the events that unfolded on January 6, 2021, when a mob descended on America’s capital in a bid to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
The Supreme Court on Monday overturned a Colorado decision that would’ve barred Trump from the state’s ballot. Notwithstanding some disagreement among legal experts and scholars, the ruling was a foregone conclusion. And not just because this is a court Trump stacked and a court where one justice’s spouse was in direct contact with Trump’s network in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot. It was a foregone conclusion because the court, like everyone else with the capacity to intercede in what history may remember as the demise, temporary or otherwise, of American democracy, is terrified.
In addition to marking yet another missed opportunity to head off a disaster of historic proportions, the court’s decision is notable for being irreconcilable with common sense.
Plainly, Trump was the ringleader in a scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Just as plainly, that scheme culminated in a riot at the Capitol, where the former president’s supporters erected a gallows and shouted, among other things, “Hang Mike Pence!” True, Trump wasn’t present on Capitol Hill, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. According to testimony, upon learning he wouldn’t be able to attend the festivities, an “irate” Trump told his security detail, “I’m the f–king’ president, take me up to the Capitol now.” When he was told no, he allegedly attempted to grab the wheel of his Secret Service limousine.
Since (reluctantly) leaving office, Trump’s openly espoused the suspension of the Constitution (he later claimed his Truth Social post to that effect was misinterpreted despite the language being open to exactly one interpretation) and is adamant that he intends to wield the powers of the presidency to pursue “justice” against his political rivals should he be re-elected.
The important point is that irrespective of whether you believe Trump’s claims about 2020 and, more broadly, his persecution narrative (last month, and without so much as a hint of irony to account for — well, you know — Trump compared himself to the late Aleksei Navalny), there’s no doubt that he orchestrated a plot to remain in power after the last election, there’s no doubt that plot led directly to the events of January 6, 2021, nor is there any doubt about Trump’s sincerity when it comes to using the levers of government to exact vengeance in the event he returns to the Oval Office.
Given those considerations, assuming (fairly, I think) that the Founders would require more evidence than Trump provided for his election fraud claims before they’d countenance an attempt to block the transfer of power by force and also taking into account the recorded phone call during which Trump can be heard, plain as day, instructing Georgia officials to “find” votes that weren’t there, it’s quite difficult, where that means impossible, to imagine the framers judging Trump eligible for another term as president.
So, there’s that. And nobody’s going to convince me that the Supreme Court somehow disagrees with that assessment. I can only conclude, then, that the justices, for all their eloquent obfuscation, were simply terrified of taking a step that might’ve plausibly led to violence across the country. I can assure you the Founders were not so cowardly when it came time to stand up for democracy. (They started a war over it.)
The actual opinion was a “per curiam” — that is, delivered on behalf of the whole court, and not signed by particular justices. Sotomayor, Kagan and Brown Jackson filed a joint opinion which suggested they preferred a narrower judgment, but nevertheless concurred. Coney Barrett also penned a separate, concurring opinion in which she effectively begged Americans not to lose their minds. “For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”
I doubt it. Again, I think the message is that nobody’s prepared to stand in the way of what everybody knows is a clear and present danger to America’s system of governance. That’s astounding to me. Trump’s a threat, yes, but he’s not Saddam Hussein. He’s not going to take anyone out onto the White House lawn and shoot them in the face. He’s not Vladimir Putin. He’s not going to poison a dissident or have someone blow up the private plane of a traitor. He’s not Kim Jong-Un. He’s not going to preside over the execution of a decorated general with an antiaircraft gun. There’s nothing to be physically afraid of here. Yet. Note the emphasis.
Trump’s a walking, talking manifestation of the old adage about the deleterious consequences of “giving an inch” to someone predisposed to “taking a mile.” I don’t think Trump has it in him to be a Saddam. Or a Putin. Or a Kim. Not many people do. But we shouldn’t tempt him, and anyway, it’d be bad enough if he turned into an Erdogan or an Orban. Note that the American right increasingly sees Orban’s Hungary as a model for “good” government.
To be sure, I understand why the court wouldn’t want to take it upon themselves to remove a candidate from the ballot. Especially a presidential candidate. But they’ve decided elections before, and to me, that’s really beside the point. Again: The concern should be about Trump’s demonstrated and avowed disregard not just for America’s democracy, but for democracy in general. Somebody has to stand up to him or else nobody should mourn on the proverbial “day after.”
Oh, and folks, if you leave a comment, please… spare me the asinine allegations of bias. Obviously, I’m a progressive on socioeconomic issues, but if you’ve been around these pages for longer than six months, you know I don’t care who wins the election. Barring some turn for the truly anarchic, the result will have no impact on my life whatsoever. When I write about Trump, I’m just editorializing around what he says and does. That’s it. If you don’t like it, take it up with him.
We now know how all SCOTUS rulings involving Trump will go, as if we didn’t already. After all, Trump succeeded where FDR failed to go. So he will be free to be our very own tin-pot dictator of the tiny hands when he arrives at his adopted home in DC (he did manage to sell the one at the post office). So, yeah, I am panicking.
The problem here as I see it is the selective use of textualism in making judicial rulings. The Textualists have deviated from textual rulings here out of philosophical expediency, effectively passing the buck. Textualism therefore is not absolute but a guise used to defend the indefensible.
It seems to me the right in our country cannot get enough of losing. After spending millions of man hours on the Federalist project of textualism they find they cannot rule by textualism. What do they resort to but ‘progressive’ thinking of correcting an error in the original text an error rooted in not being able to divine the future. When will the country wake up to the thought that policies rooted in a myopic view of the past are doomed to failure? Or will it not wake up and fail in front of our very eyes?
It does seem we are waiting here for someone else to solve our problems for us. When is enough enough?
At the most basic level, the issue here for me is that Trump’s a notorious grifter. If he did an about-face tomorrow and decided to push an agenda that aligned with my own political views on every single important issue, I still wouldn’t vote for him. He can’t be trusted to deliver a decent steak in the mail or a reliably good hotel experience, let alone deliver on a political platform. That’s what gets me about this. I mean how many times can people get burned before they say “no thanks”?
H, I keep coming to some kind of dialogue with myself that what’s going on is at least in part similar to the fentanyl/meth situation in the country. Ultimately, we have a demand problem. In this case, demand for a “strong man”.
And while he’s not “strong” at all, he sure knows how to play “strong”, and as you note above, no one wants to take that on… So it works.
The people will decide. The people have witnessed Trump’s lies, they have seen him steal and cheat. The people know. Everybody knows. The people understand he is an insurrectionist. The people will be his doom. He will stay on the ballot and get beaten AGAIN, like a stubborn mule.
I don’t know about that. The risk, in my view, is that most Trump voters know he’s not a Putin but don’t understand what an Orban or an Erdogan is. They (Trump’s supporters) think “Well, he’s not a dictator, and I love him, so sure, let him be an ‘autocrat,’ whatever that means.” I don’t think they understand what goes along with even soft autocracies. It’s not always great even for allies of the autocrat. I think there’s ~even odds he wins again.
This is precisely what I’m thinking as well.
81+ million Americans kicked Trump out of the White House in 2020, and that was before January 6. I don’t see why Americans can’t keep him out of the White house by voting against him again.
Agree on all points. Dammit.
While I hope you’re right, things are not the same as last time;
https://www.yahoo.com/news/map-29-million-americans-live-153000154.html
We all look at things through the prism of our lives: our jobs, colleagues and neighbors. Many have little interaction with people from other worlds, expect for dealing with a plumber or someone at the DMV.
I get a wider read via dealing with folks in the music world who generally live check-to-check. Thir prisms are way different than mine. Inflation is a HUGE issue for them.
More telling when it comes to support for Trump – social media comments by right-wing high school acquaintances are dominated by an undercurrent of victimization and a desire to “get even” with the elites who are pushing transgender recruitment in our schools and welcoming an unfettered tsunami of smelly, dark immigrants in order to buy votes for the democrats. Revenge is a powerful motive, especially when combined with an unstated but powerful undercurrent of racism.
Unless Trump’s slide into acute memory loss really accelerates, he will win. And his supporters will take it as an “all clear” to physically attack those who look different.
Uncle Derek still recommends buying ammo while it is still available.
Back in 2018/2019 I was on the road for over a year, just traveling around. Something happened that really struck me. I met a man of Indian descent. He’d been a naturalized American citizen since he was 9, but had very dark skin and a thick Indian accept. I saw this several times: when he met new people—any new people, in casual social situations—as he introduced himself, he’d pull out his passport and show it to them. Apparently there’d been enough issues that he felt he had to habitually try to head off any potential problems at the outset. And actually he didn’t seem to be bothered by it… it was very matter-of-fact, just a part of his life.
I found that scary.
I agree that there is a chance he could win, mainly due to the fact that our elections are decided by ~100,000 people in a hand full of swing states. The vast majority of the votes just don’t matter in the way that they should. And those “swing” voters are probably the most under-informed people out there.
Everything you say is true.
First they came and told me that grade school shoot-em-ups were the unfortunate price we had to pay lest some law-abiding hunter somewhere had his weekend hunting plans derailed, or some farmer had his field torn up by pigs due to anything less than unfettered access to guns and ammo.
Now, they tell me the best cure for an allegation of insurrection, not to mention improperly taking. exhibiting (selling?), not secruring, and then refusing to return top secret documents is to run for the highest office in the land.
I have seen the enemy. It is not us. It is not them. It’s worse than that — it’s an increasingly obsolete document to which we all nominally declare unwavering fealty, while we selectively and subjectively use it to arrive at our own consensus guesstimates of what the Founders might have intended.
I agree. Congress needs to do their job. They can start with legislation on elections/insurrections, gun rights, abortion and immigration. There are additional areas that need to be addressed- but they can start with these.
Trump is an eminent disaster to everyone. To the US, its allies and eventually to everyone.
Intent is supposed to be very important in criminal trials. That should settle the question of whether there was an insurrection or a riot. My fear is the supreme court (5 of them) will call it a riot. This will basically let him off the hook. The senate has made a huge mistake not investigating Clarence Thomas, who probably knows a fair ammount of the plans to steal the election. This is as big a problem as any, IMO. Putin and Trump have an excellent chance of getting away with a great deal.
I spend a good amount of time as an elder on college campus taking classes. These people are more attuned and reasonable than their parents.
There is hope in the younger people. We just need to empower them. They are not stupid just whipped by the system into a perpetual state of servitude to debt.
I gotta admit, I’m starting to reach the point again where I feel like staying informed about current events just isn’t benefitting me. How does it help me to witness the stupidity and asinine behavior that rules today? Might be time for another several-year personal news blackout.